_Miss Bretherton_ was a trial trip, and it taught me a good deal. When
it came out I had nearly finished the translation of Amiel, which
appeared in 1885, and in March of that year some old friends drove me up
the remote Westmorland valley of Long Sleddale, at a moment when the
blackthorn made lines of white along the lanes; and from that day onward
the early chapters of _Robert Elsmere_ began to shape themselves in my
mind. All the main ideas of the novel were already there. Elsmere was to
be the exponent of a freer faith; Catharine had been suggested by an old
friend of my youth; while Langham was the fruit of my long communing
with the philosophic charm and the tragic impotence of Amiel. I began
the book in the early summer of 1885, and thenceforward it absorbed me
until its appearance in 1888.

The year 1885, indeed, was one of expanding horizons, of many new
friends, of quickened pulses generally. The vastness of London and its
myriad interests seemed to be invading our life more and more. I can
recall one summer afternoon, in particular, when, as I was in a hansom
driving idly westward toward Hyde Park Gate, thinking of a hundred
things at once, this consciousness of _intensification_, of a heightened
meaning in everything--the broad street, the crowd of moving figures and
carriages, the houses looking down upon it--seized upon me with a rush.
"Yes, it is good--the mere living!" Joy in the infinite variety of the
great city as compared with the "cloistered virtue" of Oxford; the sheer
pleasure of novelty, of the kind new faces, and the social discoveries
one felt opening on many sides; the delight of new perceptions, new
powers in oneself--all this seemed to flower for me in those few minutes
of reverie--if one can apply such a word to an experience so vivid. And
meanwhile the same intensity of pleasure from nature that I had always
been capable of flowed in upon me from new scenes; above all, from